The Girl and the Stars

Erris’s ancient pain echoed in Yaz, bringing with it an image of aurora light shivering through ice trees before the dawn. Her face twitched, eyes stung. Her fingers moved to touch Erris’s without instruction and in that moment, without any sense of movement, she stood once more before the timeless peace of the forest, caressed by a warm breeze, her hand in his, flesh and blood once more, black fingers laced with copper fingers.

“There was a girl I loved. But I fell into the void and never went back to her. I never knew how long she waited for me, what became of her life, or how she died. But I loved her and I was loved, and I keep that with me. It makes me think that I must still be alive . . . some kind of alive . . . because how could even the Missing capture a thing like that in their machines, something so sweet and fragile and strong as love?”

Yaz lifted her face and found Erris watching her, a tear on his cheek. She could have held on to her own misery forever maybe. The Ictha have strong walls. But that tear cracked her and a sob shuddered through her. Then another. And for a long time they stood, caught in each other’s arms and in their own sorrow, with the trees swaying and butterflies rising from the grass all around them, until their tears were spent.

The warmth of that day, lost in the centuries, covered by the tide of the ice, but somehow preserved for her here and now, melted something in Yaz. A coldness, the frozen core that she had been wrapped about all her life, surrendered to an ancient summer. The resolution that she would do her duty, play her role as the Ictha needed and demanded, set aside her own hopes and imagination in the grim service of mere survival, all these ran from her. Under the light of a brighter sun long-forgotten dreams began to unfurl with the caution of budding flowers.

Yaz’s presence of mind returned all at once rather than by degrees, in much the same way the enormity of recent events had suddenly overwhelmed her. She found herself in Erris’s arms, her face buried between his neck and shoulder. Shocked, she broke free, and in the next moment she was standing in the dusty junk-filled room once more, the metal construct looming above her.

“I . . . I thought we had to hurry.” She found her voice shaky, her body remembering the shape of his. The scent of him still seemed to linger on her.

“We do. Time passes differently in the void though.” He sounded uncertain too, hesitant, and that pleased her for some reason that she couldn’t squeeze into sentences. “Are you ready?”

Yaz looked beyond the wall to the endless river of power that flowed about her, there for the taking but so fierce that the slightest error would overfill her and the stolen energies would shred both flesh and bone. She didn’t have to break through the wall—Erris had told her that. She just had to travel. Yaz didn’t reach to touch the river as she always had before. Instead she strained some unsuspected muscle in her mind, trying to let the river touch her. Almost instantly she felt the currents of it flowing through her as they flow through all things, but now they seemed to notice her, to pluck at her flesh, to sweep her along. The effect was immediately alarming and swiftly became painful. The river flows in every direction the human mind can imagine and in far more that cannot be imagined. Before the competing forces could tear her apart Yaz pushed against the wall. She felt the weight of Erris’s steel hand descending upon her shoulder. At the wall the currents began to converge until, when pressed against it, Yaz could feel the dominant tug of one current in one direction. With a sigh of relief she let go her hold on the world and allowed the flow to carry her away.

16

   ARE YOU THERE?” Yaz could see nothing, feel nothing save that there was ground beneath her feet.

Only silence. Silence and a cold light, very faint, starting to grow to one side of her. This at least reintroduced direction into her world. A confusion of stark black lines began to make themselves known against the diffuse light, a thousand of them, rising, dividing, reaching, growing thinner. A wind blew. Not the sharp, fierce wind of the ice, but chill and insistent. The black lines swayed and Yaz knew them for the innumerable branches of trees, stripped of their fluttering green, left bare and black to greet the dawn.

“Erris?”

But it seemed that she had failed to bring Erris through to wherever this was. A dead forest deep below the ice? But there was a lightening sky and a wind.

“This isn’t real.” Yaz turned slowly, twigs snapping beneath her feet.

Another light burned not far off, just visible between the black multitude of trunks, this one a flame, a warm, flickering glow. A lamp. She began to move toward it, weaving her way between trees, warding off their scratching fingers, stumbling as the ground itself tried to snare her with gnarled roots that looped and twisted before plunging into black soil.

The wind at Yaz’s back slackened and turned colder, the air becoming brittle with frost as the temperature fell. Swaying branches stilled. Traceries of ice began to wrap the trunks and still the lamp’s light seemed to get no closer.

It grew colder still, not a breath of wind now. The ground’s softness turned to iron. Branches shattered as Yaz knocked them aside, running now and not knowing why. Slanting shadows painted the forest. Behind her a sun rose, its light whiter than the sun she knew, and where it should give heat it took it instead. The white light saturated the forest, wrapping dead trees in ice. This was a cold even an Ictha could respect. Far behind her came a loud retort, then closer at hand, much louder, a thick tree cracked open with shocking violence, spitting fragments of frozen bark, surrendering to the pressures of the ice expanding within it.

Suddenly the hut was there before her, the single lamp hanging before a wooden door that opened as she drew near.

“Hurry.” A thin, dark-haired man waved her in. He glanced about at the trees, a nervous quickness to him.

The interior of the hut seemed smaller than the building in all dimensions, as if the plank walls of the rough shack were a yard thick. The man heaved the door closed as though it weighed many times what he did, and joined her at a tiny table before a small but fierce fire.

“You made it then.” He seemed surprised, watching her from dark, intelligent eyes set in a face pinched up into a prominent nose. His age was hard to determine. Not young. Maybe not old. Well-preserved. His eyes were old though.

“Who are you?” Yaz dispensed with manners. She was having too strange a day for politeness.

“A drink?” He glanced around, disappointed. “Well, maybe. I’m sure I had some absinthe here a moment ago . . .”

“Who are you?”

The man leaned in over the table, both elbows on the boards. “My name is Elias. At least, that’s part of my name, but then I am only part of myself, which seems to be a common problem these days.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.” Yaz looked toward the door. “Where’s Erris? He said I had to hurry and now instead of running away I’m . . . here.”